Is anyone doing video editing on an ibook or am i dreamin'?

[mrrio]

Hi,
I have a 700mhz ibook with maxed out ram and 20 gig hardrive.
Next week i'm getting a 7200rpm 120gig external drive to go with my system. Is it realistic to think that I can do some semi-professional work (in a reasonable period of time considering the cpu speed and power) using imovie 3 & final cut pro when needed?

It's what i have to work with right now.

Any tips on tweakin' my unit or steps that may be helpful would be gladly appreciated.

Thanks!

[pusa]

I have editied video in iBook. You may experience rendering times to be slow but, what I did was just let it render and I went out. Right now, I have the G4 tower.

[Dyno]

I used my iBook 500 with 384MB RAM to do video editing for a while before I got my DP 1.25 machine and it was acceptable using either iMovie or Final Cut Express.
Rendering times are really slow though, so you'll find that you edit more carefully to cut down on the time it takes.
My new tower blows the hell out of my old iBook, but at the time I didn't know any better so I dealt with it.
I find that it works best with the iBook to set the viewer/canvas windows in FCP or FCE to 50% size rather than letting the viewers scale to the actual window size... this lets quicktime use a more efficient algorithm for displaying the video on screen so you'll get more fluid scrubs.
It also gives you a bit more processor headroom for running multiple a/v tracks during preview without dropping frames.
I will suggest though that if you find yourself getting into serious editing to consider getting a tower in the future... the speed difference is just amazing...
On my iBook, creating SVCD material (480x480 NTSC interlaced) took approximately 1 hour for every 3 minutes of source material... and on my tower I can encode 1 hour of source material in about 1 1/2 to 2 hours...
I find that I'm also enjoying the editing process more, and I have been able to get creative with the material... before, creativity meant a huge render time... usually overnight for 10 minutes of video.
You should do fine though for the time being... but I think you'll be wanting more in the future.
HTH

[mrrio]

Thanks!

[gstubbs]

Yes, you can use this setup very effectively. I have an iBook 800 and use it with Final Cut Express. It is great. The external drive you mentioned is firewire I assume. This is also a good idea. The external drive takes over the drive processing that the cpu would normally do. It also runs faster than an internal drive, especially in an iBook. 7200 rpm vs 4200 rpm. I have used an external drive that I patched together with some old (PC sorry!) hardware and I can even plug in my camera at the same time. I have been able to do all of this with only about a month of experience on a mac! Another thing you might be interested in is dual monitors. There is a good page here < http://www.rutemoeller.com/mp/ibook/ibook_e.html > Try the one time test setup first. I have successfully set this up with several monitors (crt and flat panel LCDs). Let us know how your experience goes.